Tag: eBay

Ebay has released its 2012 census, which offers a unique perspective at the state of e-commerce in India. Since, eBay sells pretty much everything under the sun, it’s in an unique position to offer us a glimpse at what Indians are buying and selling. You might be aware that a lot of youths are buying t-shirts and gadgets online, but did you know that every two minutes one note or coin is sold on eBay?

Maharashtra grabbed the top spot in terms of buying and selling stuff online, largely due to Mumbai, which is most active city on eBay India. Other cities in the top ten were Dehi, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh, and Pune. While mobile phones, watches, fragrances, and apparel dominated the list of products sold and bought, most cities had one or two surprise entries.

Delhi sold a lot of Indian notes, while Mumbai sold loads of Indian stamps. Mumbai also bought plenty of British India coins, and imported British Colonial Stamps. Chinese stamps are #1 on the list of goods imported by Chennai residents. Similarly, Hyderabad is fascinated with Malaysian coins.

Jaipur, the capital of the desert state Rajasthan, sold loads of room heaters.

Delhi bought the most chocolates, while Bengaluru exported the most Yoga videos. Kolkatans on the other hand are in love with Tibetian collectibles.

Top brands in India were Samsung, Apple, Sony, and Nokia respectively.

eBay reported its earnings for Q3 2012, with its revenue increasing 15% to $3.4 billion year-over-year. Its net income was up to $597 million, up 22% year-over-year. Its core Marketplaces product and PayPal contributed to most of the growth.

John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay, said:

“We had a great third quarter across our company, with Marketplaces and PayPal accelerating customer growth. Mobile continues to be a game changer for us, and we continue to be a clear leader in mobile commerce and payments. With our strong portfolio and global reach, we are consistently demonstrating our capabilities to help consumers shop anytime, anywhere. And we are enabling retailers of all sizes to compete in a rapidly evolving, multichannel commerce environment.”

PayPal saw its user base expand to 117.4 million active registered accounts, up 14% year-over-year. Revenue from PayPal increased 23% while the total payment volume grew 20% to $35.2 billion. PayPal continues to focus on mobile to drive most of its growth and also gained traction with PayPal Here, its competitor to Square.

In Marketplaces, the gross merchandise value increased 11% to $16 billion, while the revenue increased 9%, driven primarily by growth in the US and Asia Pacific. eBay’s cash and cash equivalents increased to $7.3 billion in the last quarter.

eBay is undergoing a significant change, as it recently introduced a new redesign, and also launched a new marketing campaign. PayPal is its prime focus now, led by David Marcus, who is now focusing on the product and customers to grow the dominant online payments service.

Groupon’s troubles just keep on piling up. As if it weren’t troubled enough already by a sagging stock price and its failure to turn a profit, today, eBay, the original internet e-commerce giant, started testing an online deals offering, which would compete directly with Groupon’s core offering – daily deals.

The new feature is called eBay Lifestyle Deals, and is being tested out in some urban areas like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.

Groupon already has tremendous competition in the space thanks to Google Offers and LivingSocial which is bankrolled by Amazon. While the daily deals space has yet to mature as a market, it is the next natural step for many e-commerce providers, since it is a nice way to improve sales and increase inventory turnover.

eBay already provided product deals, but is now also looking into deals on services, which could be even more lucrative, partnering with deal providers who arrange them with local businesses and merchants.

eBay is also looking to completely revamp its complete website to boost sales and modernize its brand image. It’ll be interesting to see how the daily deals wars play out after the entry of eBay.

eBay has acquired Svpply, a social shopping startup, to improve its chances in the online social shopping space. Svpply is a retail online curation platform which is similar to Pinterest, but focuses more on online commerce. It allows users to post and manage collections of pictures of stuff they’d like to buy. Svpply aims to provide an online windowshopping experience, and then translate that into actual sales.

Svpply apparently has close to 1.1 million products in its database, and adds nearly 3,000 products every day, covering more than 70,000 brands.

It seems to be a talent acquisition, and eBay will likely try to integrate Svpply into its own offering, and drive sales using its user base. While the acquisition amount hasn’t been revealed, it’s likely to be low.

“eBay Inc. has acquired Svpply.com, an innovative website that brings shoppers, tastemakers and merchants together onto a single site by offering a curated selection of stylish merchandise from across the Web. Users on Svpply.com recommend their style discoveries to other users, and display galleries of items they want or own.

With Svpply.com, eBay gains access to technology talent to further improve the shopping and selling experience for its customers. Svpply.com assets – including a talented team of six designers and developers – are well-suited to help eBay advance more personalized experiences and merchandising options on eBay.com.”

It’s earnings season again, and eBay has reported its earnings for the second quarter of 2012. Its revenue for Q2 2012 increased to $3.4 billion, up 23% year-over-year. Its net income growth was a bit lower at around 16% year-over-year, primarily due to the impact of increased capital investments and acquisitions.

eBay’s President and CEO, John Donahoe said:

“We delivered a great second quarter, driven by eBay Marketplaces’ best performance in years, strong growth at PayPal and strong same-store-sales growth for GSI’s large retail customers. Our entire company is strong, but we’re particularly pleased with eBay Marketplaces, which delivered its strongest organic growth in gross merchandise volume, excluding vehicles, since 2006. And mobile continues to be a game changer. We now expect eBay and PayPal mobile to each transact $10 billion in volume in 2012 — that’s more than double 2011, a staggering surge in mobile shopping and payments on devices that did not exist just a few years ago. Retail is at an inflection point, and we are helping to reshape how people around the world shop and pay.”

While eBay’s Marketplaces business continued to show impressive growth, PayPal was the business that grabbed the limelight. It ended the quarter with nearly 113.2 million active registered accounts, and continues to be the leader in the online payments space, which is expected to explode in the coming years.

eBay is working aggressively to fend off startups like Stripe, Square and others who are trying to disrupt the payments space. PayPal saw its total payments volume increase 20% to $34.5 billion. Its mobile payments volume has been growing rapidly. With PayPal Here, and PayPal is targeting retailers and merchants primarily in the U.S. and will soon target them across the globe. This week, it also acquired Card.io, which should help it bolster its point-of-sale offerings like PayPal Here.

PayPal could easily become its largest business in terms of net revenue in the coming years, considering the tremendous rate it has been growing at.

eBay ended the quarter with nearly $4 billion in cash and cash equivalents. All in all, a pretty good quarter.

eBay is definitely a place where you can snag a good deal on anything and everything. In fact, people also list their countries on sale there (See: Greece for Sale on eBay, Iceland as well). However, looks like someone put their game collection on sale at eBay this time and it fetched a bomb of a price.

The sale listing, which went with the title “BIGGEST COLLECTION EVER? 22 SEGA / NINTENDO / PC ENGINE FULLSETS,FACTORY SEALED!”, managed to sell for 1 million Euros or approximately $1.23 million. All this for a set of 7000 games.

The buyer of the product is a proud owner of all the games ever released on the Nintendo home systems, Sega systems and NEC systems. The entire package consists of 22 sets consisting of game cartridges, GameCube sets and more. You’ll find descriptions of the products included here.

The game collection sale is not the most expensive item ever sold on eBay though, but would beat the $1.2 million Honus Wagner baseball card sold in 2000 yet not as expensive $140 million yacht sold in 2005 according to Yahoo. The buyer might also have to pony up some additional fees and a 1000 Euro shipping charge and can expect to see his booty in 6-9 business days.

While the games are definitely something worth keeping, but would you pay 1 million Euros for it? Is the person who bought it crazy or just a passionate collector of games? You let me know.

They say you can put anything for sale on eBay. However, this one takes the cake.

It is a well known fact that Greece is facing a huge financial crisis and has been the most problematic nation in the Eurozone. Greece has also received bailouts from other Eurozone countries, but it is still struggling to stay stable. So what now?

It looks like one Greece citizen has taken it up on himself to right the country by putting up Greece for sale on eBay. Yes, you heard it right, Greece or what sounds like it has been put up on sale on eBay. If you thought that was bizarre, the listing has already received 75 bids and the current bid stands at $77,877.77.

This is not the first time that someone has put their country on sale on eBay successfully. Back in 2008, a guy had managed to put Iceland for Sale on eBay too.

The listing has been placed under the Weird Stuff -> Slightly Unusual category (some humor there) with a description.

I’m offering my country for sale. What is left of it anyway. Slightly used, low wages, low pensions, low expectations. Lots of sunshine though, free at the moment.

Many natural resources, minerals etc that are still untouched. Bureaucracy at its best. Great bribe-to-do system, over 20 years of experience.

Obedience at the IMF, bankers and the Troika is guaranteed, no questions asked.

The buyer will get for free 300 politicians, highly trained at the University of Fine Arts of Scandals. And free Greek Bonds with extremely high international market value. For confetti.

I will provide the best possible certificate that you will ever imagine, maybe even a custom one that you’ll ask.

Sling Media has announced its association with eBay India, Rediff.com and Infibeam.com to bring Slingbox to the Indian online marketplace. eBay India, Rediff.com and Infibeam.com will provide a platform where buyers can purchase the video place-shifting Sling media products.

Slingbox is the flagship product of Sling Media. It is a television streaming device that allows consumers to watch and control their living room television shows at any time, from any location, using internet-connected PCs, Macs, PDAs, tablets, and smartphones. Slingbox gives consumers the ability to control practically any audio/video device – including a digital cable box, satellite receiver, digital video recorder (DVR), DVD player, gaming system, or even a still video camera.

Sling media has announced two products that will be available at these portals: Slingbox PRO-HD for INR 14,999 and Slingbox SB 120 for INR 7,999. An accessory, SlingLink Turbo, that connects a Slingbox to the router if they are in different rooms of your house, is available for INR 4,999.

The last time I went to Croma, a popular electronics store chain in India, I spotted a Slingbox. The sales staff pointed out the failure’ of the device. I’m assuming that it has to be due to the low internet speeds available in India for most users. Also, technology enthusiasts who subscribe to broadband with high speeds are bummed with the Fair Usage Policy of service providers. The data cap for the FUP to kick in and lower speeds is too less for a video-streaming device.

eBay India has been working on extending their reach to mobile internet users in India. After launching a mobile website at m.ebay.in, eBay has been releasing apps for all major mobile platforms in the Indian market.

With the recent announcement of eBay.in’s Android app, which is releasing in the next week, it is covering grounds on one of the popular smartphone platforms. (UPDATE: The Android app is live here)

An iPhone/iOS app is already available and can be downloaded from iTunes here.

There is also an app for Nokia phones, specially customized for C2-02 and C2-03. The app is coming soon and would be made available in Nokia Ovi Suite and will be pre-loaded in those phones.

For non-smartphone users, ebay.in already has a mobile website which works on any mobile browser: m.ebay.in.

The other two smartphone platforms – BlackBerry and Windows Phone – have been left out as of now. While Windows Phone does not have enough penetration in India to (may be) justify development costs (Although, there is a nice Windows Phone app from eBay US in the Marketplace already), it is surprising that eBay has left BlackBerry users out in the cold.

Interestingly, eBay also serves mobile users who do not have Internet on their mobile devices. The eBay SMS Pricecheck’ feature allows you to find the best deals via SMS. All you need to do is to SMS EBAY’ <keyword> to 9223892238. Note that this facility has been affected by the latest TRAI guidelines, and you would need to enable partial DND to use the service.

While Steve Jobs is busy minting money with the new iPad 2 launch in the US of A, we Indians have to be satisfied with the old iPad that is finally being sold in stores around here. The old iPad, which is so last year has 256MB of RAM as compared to the newer one which has 512MB and is also thinner, lighter and has the wonderful smart cover accessory with a microfiber cleaning layer that cleans the screen of the iPad 2 and also doubles as a magnetically attached stand for the device.

So, do I hear all of you pouncing at the title? This means all of you must be one of those gadget crazy people with a lot of money to shell out. If you are not, then you’re going to be disappointed. The iPad 2 for us Indians can be procured at eBay at insane prices. All of these are the Wifi only models, since the 3G + Wifi is locked to the AT&T carrier in the US:-

These rates do not include the customs tax that you are bound to be faced with when you buy the iPad 2. For now, this is the only legit way of buying the iPad 2 in India at exorbitant prices. Other options are always available on eBay.com (you just need to search around!)

A word of warning here: do not trust the apparently cheapsite called shopyourworld.com. Many users have warned against using their services as they provide no physical address of their company. As always, use the Web of Trust to see whether a site is trustworthy or not.